Block-based video coding uses spatial and temporal redundancy between blocks of video in successive pictures to provide efficient encoding of video. Typically, a stream of pictures is encoded as sets of entirely intra-coded pictures (I-pictures) and inter-coded, or predictive, pictures, such as forward-predictive pictures (P-pictures) and bi-directional predictive pictures (B-pictures). Because the I-pictures are entirely intra-coded, whereas the P-pictures and B-pictures are at least partially predictively inter-coded, the coding of I-pictures takes significantly more bits than P-pictures and B-pictures, and thus may negatively impact the bit rate, jitter, and latency of a transmitted bit stream containing these encoded pictures. One approach to improving latency and jitter is the implementation of an intra-refresh mode whereby a region of each picture of a set of pictures is intra-coded, or “refreshed,” while the remaining regions of the picture are predictively inter-encoded. In the intra-refresh mode, motion predictions between pictures are restricted to the regions of previous pictures of the set that have already been refreshed (such regions typically being referred to as “clean” regions), and are prevented from using the regions of previous pictures that have not yet been refreshed (these regions typically being referred to as “dirty” regions). In conventional intra-refresh modes, the region that is entirely intra-coded (i.e., the “refresh” region) is a fixed size and shifts positions between successive pictures of an intra-refresh set of pictures. Although the goal of intra-refresh techniques is to smooth out the bitrate of the resulting encoded bit stream, the shifting position of the refresh region in conventional intra-refresh techniques often may cause significant bit rate variation, or jitter, in the presence of global motion in the displayed content as often occurs in virtual reality (VR) applications or other application with substantial motion of the “camera” representing the perspective view of the rendered pictures.